Saturday, November 30, 2013

I don´t know how many times I´ve featured Biarritz, France in my blog. Can´t help it, it´s my favorite coastal French town on this side of the world. This chic Basque paradise on the south of France is mesmerizing all-year round. Today, I´m showing you how it looks on a stormy day:

This is the church of Sainte Engrace with it´s modern gothic style. Curiously, I´ve always admired it from afar but have never really looked inside. One of these days, I´ll do that for you. :)

You can´t leave this place place without a scoop or two of French glace(ice-cream). I chose greean apple and salted caramel. Yum, yum!

I´ve been wearing this faux leather jacket since the start of fall. You ca see it in all of my pics lately, lol! Unfortunately, I can´t wear this now because we´re in full winter mode nowadays. So this will be the last time you´ll see me wearing this this year.

So how´s Thanksgiving? We don´t celebrate Thanksgiving here in Spain which is great because I can never say no to food and seeing all your food pics, makes me drool all day! hahaha!

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

It´s quite expensive to be on trend all the time. Would you like to know how to dress trendy without breaking the bank? Instead of buying that red tartan jacket/top/skirt you´ve been coveting this season, buy a pair of red tartan tights. It´s a lot cheaper and you´ll never worry if you´ll not be wearing it again next year because trends come and go, ya know. ;)

Monday, November 25, 2013

I wasn´t able to take outfit pics outside these days because of the long running bad weather in here, it´s been almost a month with nothing but rain and chilly winds from the north! So here´s another set of pics instead which were taken when we stopped by Toledo, Spain. After seeing these photos, I noticed that my outfit matched with the background which is the Cathedral of Toledo. Is that good or bad?

Pardon the really bad hair. This is my newly washed hair, you know. If you see me with nice hair, that would be my day old or more than two days old hair because contrary to popular belief, my hair looks nicer after it gets dirtier by the day. Eeeew!

Friday, November 22, 2013

It´s still wet and cold in here with two minutes of sunshine once in a while and so let me entertain you with some pics and a summery outfit( I wore this three weeks ago in sunny Catalonia)to liven up this bi-polar weather. On my last night and day in Vila Franca( in Alto Penedés), we toured around this medium sized town and wine capital of the Catalonian region of Spain. It has a wine museum which is a must-see when you stay here and a plus to the visit is that they offer a free wine and cava( champagne) tasting too! By the way, the famous Spanish winemakers Torres can also be found here, all the more reason to come and visit this bustling town.

I debuted my dotted peter pan collared top and fluoro flats for the first time here in the blog. I´ve worn these two a lot of times already but I still haven´t taken a picture of them together until now. It´s fall as you can see on the leaves in the photo but the weather feels like summer on this side of Spain. Lovely! :)

Moving on, we stopped by Montserrat, another must place to visit when you´re in Barcelona. It´s my third time already here but everytime I come here it feels like it´s the first time. I loveseeing the jagged and naturally sculpted stone mountains, the abbey and the beautiful gothic church/sanctuary of the Virgin of Montserrat.

Since the Benedictine Abbey is quite high( almost 1,000 meters), it´s quite chilly up there. You need a cardigan for the warm days and a very thick coat for the colder days.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

At this time of the year, we usually take long weekend trips around Spain or to nearby Portugal. This time we stopped by Toledo and Cuenca and only used Madrid as a place to sleep for the night. More photos of Toledo and Cuenca in my later posts( I know, I owe you a lot of travel posts!) but let me just show you a glimpse of our last day spent in Madrid at the height of the garbage collection strike in Spain. Spain´s capital city took our breath away literally for the wrong reasons especially while looking for a place to dine in one of the most transited and oldest streets, La Gran Vía but it´s surprising to see that they´re still a lot of tourists in the street amidst the mounting pile of trash!

Anyway, here are some shots from our short morning walk at the Plaza de Castilla and around El Parque de Retiro, two of the places which were relatively garbage free at that time:

jacket,sweater- H&M, skirt- Stradivarius, bag- Bimba y Lola

I decided to wear my puffy blue skirt for the last time and wore something preppy as usual.

So how´s the midweek? We´re having a cold snowy Wednesday in here, I hope yours is sunny and warm while I stay curled on the sofa with my thick blanket. ;)

Monday, November 18, 2013

I´m back and feeling better. The close friend which I´ve been telling you about last week was found and she´s survived together with her family. Thank God! Help for the typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda victims are coming in although there are still islands which needed a lot help. Thank you all for your prayers and help in cash or in kind, they´re very much appreciated. I´m hoping for a speedy recovery of the affected islands although I know that full recovery would take a long time to do so but hey, if there´s a will, there´s a way! :)

Here´s a what I wore selfie that I took three weeks ago when we had a long weekend trip to the Catalonian region of Spain. I should´ve posted this a long time ago but wasn´t able to:

While the boots and jeans remain a staple in my outfits nowadays, the 3/4 light floral cardigan has long since gone back into hiding in my closet. What I´ve been wearing these days are thick sweaters and jackets because winter came in early. We even had snow last Friday.Where´s fall, by the way?

Enjoy the week, y´all while I continue to keep warm on this second cold and wet week. Haaaay!

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

I am in mourning this week. As most of you have already known, my home country, the Philippines, specifically in the Visayas region, have suffered the most vicious and powerful typhoon to ever hit inland in modern history. That´s Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda in Philippine name) to you.

Although I´m thankful that my beautiful island Negros was spared from the brunt, I can not say the same for the islands of Leyte, Samar, in some parts of Cebu, Aklan, Antique, Capiz and in Coron, Palawan. A cousin lost her home in Capiz while she´s preparing the burial of her grandmother in my hometown in Negros. Thank God her family survived. A very close friend of mine who´s also my maid-of-honor in my wedding and her family can not be found until now. She lives in Tacloban, Leyte and has two children, a five year old boy and a pretty girl who´s just celebrated her first birthday last month. I´m worried...

I´m sparing you the gruesome photos and heart wrenching videos of the aftermath because I know that you´ve seen them all in the news. All I wanted to ask is your prayers and to say thank you to everyone who have come forward to offer their help in these harrowing times especially in the Visayas region.Your solidarity and thoughtfulness mean a lot to the Filipino people and we´ll never forget you´re generosity. To all the countries in the world who have extended their help since day one of the aftermath, maraming, maraming, salamat po!

I´ve placed a photo and a link(just click on the photo) to the Philippine National Red Cross website on the upper right corner of blog or you can contact your local NGOs or Red Crosss if you want to share something. You can donate later, it doesn´t have to be now. Just continue praying that help for the victims may come the soonest possible because a lot of areas in the affected islands are still blocked from all the debris accumulated from the typhoon.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Here are a few OOTD snapshots which we took while visiting a hotel-winery called Hotel-Bodega Marqués de Riscal in La Rioja, Spain a few week ago. It was the tail end of summer then and so you´ll see me with just a 3/4 sleeve dotted top, dark jeans and loafer for romping around. ;)

The hotel was designed by famous Canadian architect Frank Ghery who also designed Bilbao´s Guggenheim Museum. Those wavy canopies in three distinct colors: silver, gold and ¨pink/rose¨gold are made of titanium and changes in color depending on the sun´s reflection. This is a five star hotel whose number of rooms don´t even reach 40( I think!) and guess what, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt stayed here when they visited Spain. ;)

More details on this hotel-winery in my next posts, in the meantime here´s a parting shot from the vineyards:

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

I´m bringing WIWW to you from my kitchen door today. These photos are two weeks old, yeah, you read that right because I tend to post some of my pics a few decades later, hahaha! Anyway, I think this would be the last time you´ll see me wearing open toed shoes( at least without tights) because the weather´s gone wintery these days. That means cold, windy and rainy though there isn´t snow yet. Oh please, just not yet! But that doesn´t stop me from wearing something bright like this bright yellow sweater, multi-colored scarf and pearls. :)

On dreary days like these, we need a burst of color for that perk me up, don´t we? ;)

Monday, November 4, 2013

Have you tried taking outfit photos in the cemetery? Well, I just did and yeah, I´m crazy like that. hahaha! We visited FIL´s( father-in-law) tomb yesterday and just before leaving the place, a morbid idea came to my mind. I told the hubz to take my outfit photos and good thing he was game. We did it in 3 minutes flat and here it goes:

I also debuted my blue suede booties(pardon the blurred photo) which have been sitting in my closet for a month.

I´ve always thought of having an outfit photo taken in a cemetery. It sounds spoooky( lol!) but this cemetery is more than a hundred years old and it has a very old world feel to it. So would you dare? ;)

Friday, November 1, 2013

How are you enjoying the holiday? Still trick or treating? ;) Frankly, I don´t know what to post today but since almost every one is on the spooky bandwagon this week, I might as well join the fun! Today, I´m bringing you to Bragança´s Iberian Mask and Costume Museum. Bragança is a booming and culturally rich city in the north-easteren region of Portugal. If I was a kid, I wouldn´t dare go inside this museum because I´m sure it would give me nightmares later but now that I´m an adult, I´m really enjoying an appreciating the art of mask making. ;)

Here´s a souvenir shot of my stay:

The red mask below reminded me of the ¨bad spirit¨ in the film Insidious and I had to share this photo with my horror film loving sister in Facebook too, lol!

This museum houses the masks and costumes collected over the years from the Portuguese carnival which is celebrated in the towns near Bragança. Do you know that the mask carnival dates back to the Celtic times? Anyway, there were also not so scary masks such as these below but that ¨scarecrow¨ like mask below scared me just a teeny bit, hehe.

And just before Miley Cyrus re-immortalized the ¨twerk¨( Elvis Presley did the original), here´s a ¨dude¨who loves sticking his tongue out. ;)